The Equal Pay Act is 50! But don’t bring out the banner yet…

The 1970 Equal Pay Act has hit the big 5-0! If it were a person, it would be contemplating retirement daily, booking a cruise and mulling over an over-the-top purchase to mask a crippling mid-life-crisis.

Don’t bring out the banner just yet though. In reality, 50 years means only that the gender pay gap is another year older, another year wider. Hitting this milestone is less a mid-life crisis than it is just a crisis.

What is the Equal Pay Act of 1970?

Earlier this year, the 29^th of May 2020 to be exact, marked 50 years since the 1970 Equal Pay Act was passed into UK Law. The law required employers to pay their workers, regardless of gender, the same contractual pay for equal work. Before this new legislation, women were commonly contracted under a lower rate of pay than their male counterparts. Often, you would see them categorised into four grades:

• Male – skilled
• Male- semi-skilled
• Male- unskilled

And then…

• Female

The Act removed women as the separate and lowest category. Over five years, employers had to increase women’s pay to be in line with the “Male-unskilled” category. Not great but progress, nonetheless.

How did people react?

The Equal Pay Act did not appear overnight. The change in the law was as a result of years of striking and protesting from women workers across the country. From Dagenham’s machinists to Grunwick’s Film Processors, discontent with conditions and pay was rife even after 1970. The Dagenham machinists, in particular, felt that the law barely scratched the surface. They felt like pawns of a much larger political chess game, led by MP Barbara Castle. Although the law raised their rate of pay. It did not change how their work was valued nor the conditions that they faced daily. The demand for “Equal Pay for Equal Work” was only the beginning of what would become the Women’s Liberation Movement. The Act was just a moment of a larger movement towards economic independence for women through equal education and training. It was not a fight that was going to be won easily.

Resistance to the Equal Pay Act

You cannot fault employers for their creativity. Despite equal pay between the sexes being enshrined in legislation, bosses continued to search for loopholes to get around the law. And when they didn’t find one, they made one up. Dragging their heels, they adjusted women’s rates to be in line with the lowest male rate even if the job was more challenging than the men’s. As in the case of the Dagenham machinists. When that didn’t work, they developed new job titles for women to mislead people.

How far have we come?

“In the UK, we are luckily enough to live in a society that expects equal pay for workers regardless of background.”

That kind of cheap illusion wouldn’t fool anyone these days…right? In the last 50 years, we have indeed come a long way in terms of equality in the workplace. Ten years ago, the 1970 Act was incorporated into the 2010 Equality Act. This brought together nine other anti-discrimination acts into one convenient and easy-to-find piece of legislation.

Since the original act, we have become to understand that discrimination can be intersectional. The law needed to be strengthened to accommodate for this new definition. Not to mention to put other forms of workplace discrimination (Race, Ethnicity, Disability, Sexual Orientation, Gender Reassignment, Age and Religion etc.) under the same microscope of scrutiny as gender discrimination.

Creating a culture of workplace equality takes time. It often begins with legislation until it becomes a habit you don’t remember starting. In the UK, we are luckily enough to live in a society that expects equal pay for workers regardless of background. We would be shocked at anyone who did any different.

In 2017, we even made it that much harder for companies and public sector organisations to shirk their responsibility to their workers. The UK government made it so organisations over 250 employees would have to “publish and report specific figures on their gender pay gap”. Under current legislation, these organisations must report their mean and median gender pay gap, the mean and median gender bonus gap as well as the proportion of men and women that are receiving a bonus and what pay quartile they fall in. This data also needs to be published as a written statement on the organisation’s website or risk being in breach of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s regulations. In short, this new law makes it harder than ever for a pay gap to exist.

The Gender pay gap is gone now, right?

There might be tighter restrictions than ever before, and it might feel like the gender pay gap should be the stuff of history books but it’s not yet. In 2019, the gender pay gap was 17.3% on average or women were paid on average 83p to every £1 men made. The gap widens depending on job sector, employment type (full or part-time), by region along with a host of other intersectional factors from age, race, religion, sexual orientation, and disability.

The reasons why the gap exists are more subtle than they were back in 1970. It is not simply down to the rate of pay but the kind of employment that women take on. In this video made by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the complexities behind it are explained.

For instance, women are more likely to work part-time to accommodate for childcare. They are also more likely to work in ‘low-skilled’ jobs where pay is lower and where access to senior roles and pay are limited. Eight out of ten care workers are women for instance. COVID-19 has also exposed that BAME workers disproportionately make up the coined “key-worker” sector. It is the cracked mirror that our society needs to look into to finally see its ugly and structurally unequal reflection.

There are still industries that do not pay men and women equally. Perhaps the most obvious example is the case that brought the BBC’s treatment and pay of its women presenters into the public eye. Earlier this year, Newswatch’s Samira Ahmed won her case against the BBC after it was revealed that she had received £700,000 less than Jeremy Vine who presents a similar “audience feedback” show.

We’ve just covered the gap but the fracture is deeper than ever

The case against the BBC led by its nationally recognised women presenters is an extreme example of the discrimination and unconscious bias that continues to fracture the workplace.

However, as Baroness McGregor-Smith OBE identified in her review: Race in the Workplace, it is unconscious bias that is “more pervasive and potentially more insidious [than overt racism] because of the difficulty in identifying it or calling it out”. Of course, the same can be said of all forms of discrimination. As we continue to discover the deep-rooted impact of intersectional discrimination, we are made to face how deep that fracture continues to be. How one person can be born into a world that refuses to recognise their worth because they do not tick the cis-male, white or able-bodied criteria.

COVID-19: the Feminist’s Dilemma

“It is already shameful that the gap continues to exist after 50 years.”

COVID-19 might be cracked mirror that we all need to look into. However, it is also a conveniently sized rug that the gender pay gap can be neatly swept under and forgotten about. The UK Government announced a suspension of the Gender Pay Gap Reporting required of organisations since 2017. We know that women and the BAME community have been unnecessarily affected by Coronavirus and Charles Cotton fears that “we risk losing momentum in our efforts in closing the gap”.

It is already shameful that the gap continues to exist after 50 years. Surely, we don’t want it around long enough to get a birthday card from the Palace too?

Rebecca Carey

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Featured Image courtesy of Sarah Mirk via Flickr. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.